April 16, 2018
Dawn has arrived in an overcast sky. The house is cool. The heater is laboring. Daisy just paced into the kitchen and picked up a sock in her gentle, soft mouth. This is an expression of her love for us. Her collection of our socks. She finds them and carries them away to a corner or beneath a table to nudge and sniff for a time. The dishwasher clicks softly and rhythmically in the kitchen. A single bird chirps. The ground is wet outside, the asphalt driveway dark with water.
I made a coffee in the Italian moka pot. Before that, I did my yoga, meditating first. Breathing the way my yoga teacher Cybele taught me for two decades. Deeply. Feeling the breath travel in through my nostrils and down to my belly, then filling my chest. Imagining the breath rooting me to the ground. Emptying my chest as the breath travels out. Falling into the gap before beginning the next breath.
We are home, and something exciting is happening outside now. The side of the neighbor’s house is suddenly aglow. A scrap of blue sky shows out the window. The sun is struggling through gaps in the cloud cover, bringing beneficent light and color to the world. Daisy paces now. She’s exchanged sock for ball. She always picks the best time of day to walk. She knows.
As usual, I will ignore her, and walk her on my time. Even though she is right. Now is the time to go.
We returned home from Italy only a handful of days ago. Thursday night. Today is Monday. Four days. Yet, it feels like an eternity. It feels in some ways like we never left. I don’t know why or how this can be. But there it is.
We went to Northern Italy. We went to Vicenza in the Veneto region of the country to see my children’s family, to meet them for the first time. Ryan and Magda are Italian citizens. I got them their citizenship when they were toddlers, when it was possible to claim citizenship in some European countries through a grandparent. That’s the way I got my EU passport — through my Irish grandparents. And that’s the way I got the kids their EU passports — through their Italian grandfather on their father’s side.
Yet, although they are Italian citizens, the kids had never been to Italy, or to Europe at all. I always meant to travel with them. To take them around the world. To give them the international education I was blessed with, through my father’s work in the middle east. I wanted that for them. But we never really had that kind of money, or what we did have wasn’t properly saved for that use.
Suddenly, Ryan was 20, Magda was nearly 17. Ryan is getting ready to leave for college to his transfer school, and then kaput, I’m a half-empty nester. The dreams of travel, at least while my kids are still home, gone. So, I girded myself, cashed in a portion of my retirement (I know, I know — never a good idea, but hey), and bought the tickets.
I thought, if we’re going to go to Europe for the first time to meet the kids’ family, we’re going to stay long enough to feel the place. I aimed for two weeks, but when the cheaper tickets kept appearing with flight departures taking place mid-week rather than at the weekends, I opted for that itinerary, and wound up with 17 days of booked vacation.
This gave me pause. I was concerned it was too much time, too many days. But with a day’s travel time on either end, it was merely a solid two weeks in Italy. Somehow, though I tried every which way to justify it, it seemed like an egregiously long time. It felt, in fact, transgressive.
I thought a lot about this during the trip, unfortunately. Incredibly, so did the kids. The truth is, as much as I hate to admit it, it was difficult for us to relax. All of us felt like we were playing hooky.
Now it’s hailing, pea-sized pellets of ice are bouncing all around the garden, in profusion and making quite a racket.
What gets me though is that two weeks, while it is somewhat luxurious, is nothing compared to how Europeans vacation. And what gets me further is how deeply ingrained the sense of duty and guilt is in all of us. We simply could not take a break from our lives, which is what vacation is supposed to be about. The kids felt guilty about missing school. I felt guilty and nervous about the amount of time away from work.
Isn’t that strange? And sad? It strikes me that it is.
Regardless, as we all coped with varying degrees of success with our anxiety, we did accomplish what we set out to do in Italy, and we did have some special times.
Now it’s time to process the trip. What stood out for me was the abundance of art — the beautiful art, more art than Italy knows what to do with. It was common to see some exquisitely carved angel or frieze slab propped up in a corner. The churches with original art by Titian, Tintoretto, and other greats were astounding. You became almost numb to it. Every church we entered (and they are everywhere) was impressive.
We attended a Van Gogh exhibit in Vicenza. It was crowded. A long line snaked around the building. I had bought our tickets two weeks before leaving, as soon as I heard about it while researching Vicenza, so we were able to walk right in. The galleries were crowded, but silent, with a palpable aura of reverence. I noted how respectful the viewers were. It was as though we were in a church. If people spoke at all, it was in whispers.
We saw many gorgeous Van Gogh pieces we’d never seen before and didn’t know about, and they were right there on the wall, not cordoned off, not covered by glass, not guarded by myriad uniformed attendants. It was a very civilized way to experience art.
We attended a Picasso exhibit in Genoa, near the end of our trip, when we went to Finale Ligure in Liguria, on the Italian Riviera. That was a similar experience, though less crowded.
I think the kids got a feeling for the importance of art, the gravity, the history — and so did I. I felt more than I ever have, I realized in fact, that our museums are crucial, especially now, when it feels like the whole world is losing something essential about the human experience, about what it means to be human, to feel, to express, to be. Not just to make money, pollute the world, and “get ahead.” Not just to witness, helplessly, the suffering of our fellow man all around us.
The weather in Europe was uncooperative. It was raining when we arrived, raining when we left, and raining intermittently in between. We had about four days of sun, I would say. As I’ve been writing, we’ve just had a tremendous hail storm here in the east bay area of northern California. The streets are white. Magda, Daisy, and I went out and took a video. We slipped and slided and laughed as we were pelted with sizable round hail stones.
The kids both got sick in Europe. Ryan arrived with a cold and left with a new one. Magda arrived with a cold and left with stomach flu, having thrown up seven times the day before our flight home and once in the airport the morning of. We were constantly huddling under umbrellas and trying to stay dry.
At the same time, there were highlights. Stumbling across the Duomo in Milan by accident was priceless. We were walking down a narrow street that suddenly opened up to a plaza and there was the Duomo, skeletal, pink-white, soaring, extravagant. The kids were totally wowed. They gasped in shocked delight.
We met the family — the reason for our trip. They were reasonably kind, but a bit reserved, and the language barrier was significant. Apparently, there’s some tension around Nono, the kid’s grandfather, who, the story goes, showed up for his piece of the (very modest) farm after sending money for years to Italy to keep a stake. This was shortly after WWII, and huge swathes of the population had no food to eat, which is why my kids’ grandfather left. But, apparently, the family didn’t take too kindly to the demand. Maybe they felt my kids were there to do the same, make some kind of demand of them.
They are modest people, with education not a paramount value, and no books in sight. They invited us for Easter lunch. We brought an Easter cake and Sprüngli chocolates from the Zurich airport. The house had a little tiled entry hall, two kitchens, for some reason, and little else. The adults ate at a large table in one kitchen, and the kids in the other. Communication was difficult, nearly impossible. But, good cheer reigned. After some time trying to include me, the family began talking amongst themselves. I recognized the word for attorney, similar to the Spanish, abogado and noted the distress of one of the daughter’s of the matriarch, the last person alive from the old guard who knew Luigi’s father.
I gathered a husband had left, and a divorce was in the offing. She was there alone, no husband in tow.
After lunch, we were taken for a bike ride, which was a relief as no communication was needed. We just peddled lazily after the family. The matriarch, in her 80s, led the procession. We stopped to watch cows be milked “by robot.” Later, we visited the “stallion” at a friend’s farm, which turned out to be a tractor (?). We kept looking for a horse, while the family took us for rides in a huge tractor, which we gradually came to understand was the “stallion.” Toward evening, the family dropped us off at a nearby bus station where we waited for an hour before learning the buses don’t run on Easter. We took an expensive cab from the countryside back to Vicenza.
The real highlight of our trip, however, was making the acquaintance of Giovanni Padula and his lovely family in Finale Ligure, in Liguria on the Italian Riviera, and being hosted in a way I have never been before, in a way I never expect to be again. You see, this extraordinary man I’d met only by chat on a tango thread three or four years earlier extended himself to us… totally. And just because. And not because they are wealthy and “can” (because they are not. Wealthy, that is.) But because Giovanni takes the concept of hosting a guest to heart and truly and in the old fashioned sense of the word.
I had messaged him a couple of weeks before our departure, remembering our chat of several years before, remembering he lived in northern Italy. I thought it would be fun to visit him. He responded by inviting us to Finale Ligure, his home. He said he would be our host. He booked us a hotel room and took us under his wing for four days, from the time our train door opened and he was standing there, right in the doorway, smiling broadly with his 18-year-old daughter by his side, to the very last night, when after a leisurely several-course lunch with his family, he took us on a walk to the seaside promenade and delivered us to our hotel. He took care of every detail of our four-day visit, planning the agendas for each day, hosting us for dinner on Saturday, coffees, ice cream, lunch on Sunday, museum entrances, and all incidentals. When I went downstairs the morning of our departure to Milan to pay the hotel bill, I was told it had been paid. By Giovanni. I was thunderstruck.
When I got home and told my friend Lindsey, she understood. She said, of course. That’s hosting. He said he’d host you, and he did.
When I thanked him, he said he was from southern Italy, colonized long ago by Greeks and Romans. Giovanni said said he was following the lesson of Homer’s Odyssey. “They left us the lesson to honor the guests, to make them safe and loved, to give them good food, joy, relaxing times.” He said, “Ulysses, an adventurous man, hungry of knowledge… wherever he sank, he was hosted, and he gave in (ex)change, interesting stories about his sailing and travels, the same you did.”
